How many organizations use CiviCRM? Where? How?

This post is the first in a series that will present results from the CiviCRM statistics project. It will focus on better framing the organizations that use CiviCRM. Further posts will explore the technologies used to run CiviCRM, the software development process, the CiviCRM community and communications, and lift the hood on how our statistics are created and processed.

But before we reach that last post in the series, it needs to be said that CiviCRM does collect statistics from a number of sources in order to better understand how the software is used and how the community performs. These statistics are always collected anonymously and presented in aggregate to further protect the privacy of our users and contributors, and site administrators can disable statistics collection at any time. Also, the graphs presented in this and subsequent posts are dynamic and refreshed every day ; so please excuse any potential discrepancies between the graphs and their descriptive text.

So... how many organizations use CiviCRM worldwide?

Whoaaa.There are close to 9,000 nonprofit or governmental organizations worldwide relying on CiviCRM day after day to run their operations. This of course excludes demonstration sites or sites active for less than 90 days.

Combined, these nonprofits currently manage more than 140 million contacts and have processed more than 70 million financial transactions and 13 million event registrations to date. All with CiviCRM!

Time for a pat on the back!

Now... are CiviCRM users comprised more of smaller or larger nonprofits?

Well, it turns out that this is quite even: while about half of CiviCRM users have less than 2,500 contacts in their database, there are still close to 1,000 CiviCRM users that have more than 100,000 contacts in their database.

So CiviCRM is well suited to serve any size of nonprofit.

And... where are these organizations located?

About 50% are located in the United States, the rest being mostly Europe. This is definitely something that can be improved upon over time, and there are likely many nonprofits located in South America, Asia or Africa that would benefit from CiviCRM. Unfortunately there seems to be a deficit of technical skills in these regions given that not many implementers located there. Likewise, it would probably be cost-prohibitive to drive these implementations from the US or Europe.

Finally... which languages are used in CiviCRM?

This is a really surprising number! While CiviCRM is very well translated into many foreign languages, more than 85% of CiviCRM installations configured are still configured with English. As a community we could, and should, encourage and promote local language usage of CiviCRM as this can only increase its attractiveness and use beyond the English-speaking community. This might entail translating some help resources or having non-English forums, but would be well worth the extra effort.

Please comment below, and stay tuned for further posts in this series.

On the number about 'default country' over 1200 installations are reported as N/A. Is thta becuase no default country is set for those installs (not applicable), or is it becuase we don't have that data (not available)?

I think in terms of extending the use of CiviCRM outside of the English speaking world and beyond North America and Europe, this will be led by local champions promoting the software in their local territory. It's interesting to note the defualt country category of 'Other' which has nearly 800 installs (pushing towards 10% of the total). If CiviCRM has ambitions to grow its footprint beyond the usual suspects, learning who the champions are in this 'other' category, and supporting their efforts, will pay dividends.

On their own these numbers are interesting. Set in comparison with some of CiviCRM's main competitors they become extremely interesting. Do we have access to that data?

Nicolas - this blog post is great. Fantastic to have these stats out in the open at last :) and I love the way they update dynamically.

I think the organisational address in this form http://d45.demo.civicrm.org/civicrm/admin/domain?action=update&reset=1 will provide a better reflection of our geographic spread than the default country variable which we are currently collecting (which is often left blank for good reasons - take for example an organisation based in Spain that works across Europe. They would likely fill in the organizational address as Spain but leave the default coutry blank).

I had a quick look and it doesn't appear to be in the Config variable but imagine it would be fairly simple to find with with a call to CRM_Core_BAO_Domain in CRM/Utils/VersionCheck.php. Would be great to get this (and any other changes to stats collection) ready in time for 4.6 stable if possible.

Actually, the language numbers do not look all that surprising to me. While many languages are hard to match up because they are used in several countries, the numbers for Polish/Poland for example match up exactly, and Italian/Italy is pretty close too.

In other words: This is *not* about translations not being used. It is about the (well-known?) fact that CiviCRM itself still finds rather limited use outside of English-speaking countries. (If anything, I would have expected an even lower number of non-English installations...)

The truth is that there are still many issues making international CiviCRM use quite painful. We are working on this more or less systematically here in Germany for example; and we have made considerable progress already -- but we are definitely not there yet.

This is of course amplified by the chicken-and-egg problem between shortage of experienced local integrators and shortage of well-paying local customers... (Along with the fact that the more tricky set-up for non-English regions makes it even harder to get going without an integrator.)